by Keeley Bell. @omgitskee.
BELLEVUE, WA – Grief-stricken 16-year-old Bayleigh Littleford was recently faced with the most crushing news of her life: that her favorite musical would never actually be staged.
“My favorite musical has never been Spring Awakening or Heathers or Sweeney Todd like other teens,” Littleford began while arranging flowers for the musical’s funeral service she was planning. “It’s always been Ruth: The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Musical, a show I found on YouTube when I was 10. Sure, the only thing that proves it ever existed is a playlist of 720p videos taken at a single 54 Below concert, but it was real to me. I deserve some time and space to mourn.”
Littleford discovered that the show’s composer, Melody Wright, left New York in 2016 and pivoted to a dairy farming career in Wisconsin. It wasn’t until Wright finally responded to Littleford’s 77th Instagram DM asking when Ruth would be produced did she reveal she had no plans to resuscitate the musical.
“Falling in love with a musical from its long-forgotten workshop clips that were uploaded to YouTube in the early 2000s is one of the worst things that can happen to a person,” said Tenley Kole, Littleford’s classmate and president of their high school drama club.
Adjusting her black dress and veil, she added through tears, “There’s no proshot, no cast album, and you have to piece the plot together from a series of blog posts from 2009. It’s devastating. And kind of hard to follow?”
We attended Littleford’s service for Ruth, and caught up with some of the mourners from her community. After finding out that the urn on display was filled with the ashes of pages of hand-typed lyrics to the show’s score, Littleford's friend Morty Gorman weighed in.
“I get that she likes the show, but this is a little intense. Besides, if anything deserves a funeral, it’s the defunct Caddyshack musical that I discovered scrawled in a journal that was sold at Goodwill in 1999. THAT was art.”
While further exploring why this was such an overwhelming loss to Littleford, our team discovered that in just this past year year, Bayleigh’s parents got divorced, her cat ran away, and Josh Dwyer asked Krissy Strauss to the 8th grade dance. Our research team has concluded that maybe, just maybe, this whole Ruth thing was never about Ruth.
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